Black Mirror, s7 (2025)

It’s possible that Black Mirror creator, chief writer, and showrunner Charlie Brooker’s well is running dry, but I thought s7 was an improvement and even something of a return to form over s6, which leaned way too hard for me into easy horror. The show still feels a little tired, but priorities are back in order. The familiar sardonic view of corporate absolute control was sharp as ever in the first episode, “Common People.” It involves a miracle pharmaceutical that upgrades brain function against tumors and disease. The problem is that it’s expensive and only getting more so as tiered “membership” levels come available. To defray costs, lower-tier users serve as advertising media, involuntarily dropping product pitches into everyday random conversation, with predictably loony (and intense) results. Other episodes, creaking slightly as they may, take on the multidimensional lifestyle in a competitive work environment, immersive AI in a unique type of film restoration, and the usual world-ending levels of computer hackery. Perhaps the most interesting development here—perhaps a sign of where Brooker’s imagination is drifting—is a kind of sequel to the USS Callister storyline from s4. I say sequel, but the relation between them is more like the first was a pilot for a TV show and now this redux is the first episode of the first season. It’s a parody of Star Trek, a good one that rivals even Galaxy Quest, focused more on the original series (“TOS”) than The Next Generation or anything that followed. Jesse Plemons plays the Captain Kirk character—he is as interested as James T. Kirk in getting laid but a far more unbalanced and cruel person. In real life he is Robert Daly, a software developer and creator of a successful immersive space opera computer game. A DNA replicator enables him to bring coworkers into his private version of the game. At least a couple of familiar points are here. One is the little electronic nubbin you affix to your temple which enables so much technology in Black Mirror. The other is the idea that “digital cloning” brings an essential element of consciousness into the software and/or device or game. Digital clones are not just some kind of empty replicant but bear essential sentience and self-awareness in their own right. Both USS Callister scripts shade their characters to appear different from different angles. Daly at first appears to be a harmless dweeb, but when he keeps calling himself “a nice guy” in conversations with women we start to get the picture he’s more of a petulant incel. As the captain of a spaceship, he is a monster. But I suspect Brooker is having so much fun with his Star Trek universe that I wonder if he wouldn’t like to dedicate a whole season to boldly going around in it.

Dead Set (2008)

Admissions made freely: I have never seen the Big Brother reality TV show (let alone the UK version) nor have I explored the zombie genre extensively. But I know how they work and this short British five-part miniseries, which clocks in under two and a half hours in total, has a lot of fun with both. I believe 2008 is still a little early for streaming, if not entirely for peak TV. Dead Set was broadcast on five consecutive nights in late October 2008. It almost feels chopped apart with an axe, with little in the way of credits before or after each commercial sitcom-sized episode (at least as they're available on Netflix) and only the most basic jagged stop and start points. It's made to binge even if it wasn't possible then. And these days does less than three hours even count as binging? As a zombie exercise, Dead Set aligns itself formally more with the 28 franchise style of fast zombies, and there's lots that we know here: the breakdowns of social norms, all human weakness related to the seven deadly sins vividly at work, the heartbreak and shock of seeing loved ones die and then turn, and don't forget you have to get these things in the head. As usual, it's not the coronavirus zombies, it's the humans who can't handle reality. And what better place to look for people who can't handle reality than on the set of a reality TV show? That's the genius of this one, along with its impossibly fast-cut tumbling stomping zombie attacks, a minute or two at a time. There's a reflexive love story for the usual sake of raising the stakes or whatever but mostly these characters are reality TV show types—starved for celebrity, seeing all things worthwhile in fame and attention, drawn like moths even in a pandemic zombie apocalypse. Dead Set is an early and workmanlike effort by Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker. It fits well with the aesthetics of 2000s zombies, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, and Shaun of the Dead. It's harrowing, often gross, and funny in a kind of brutal way. Jaime Winstone's Kelly is the heroine, and a number of these reality TV contestants are memorable (notably Kathleen McDermott's Pippa, something of a straight man, a cheesecake in a slinky gown who can only helplessly squeak "I don't like it" as events unfold). The actual hero is porn-mustachioed Andy Nyman as the TV show producer and one of entertainment's great pigs—in a Brooker story, in a zombie picture, in cinema at large. He gleefully steals this show and takes it over the top like Krusty the Clown with bubonic plague. He's the worst monster here and you hate him until he becomes iconic in his death. You've heard of chewing the scenery? You've seen nothing. Definitely worth a look.

Black Mirror, s5 (2019)

It was good to catch up on the Channel 4 / Netflix series Black Mirror—not surprisingly, it's thumb's-up pandemic viewing. I skipped the opening pig-fuck episode of the first season, as I did not need to see it again for all its eye-popping bravado, and made my way forward into the third and fourth seasons that until recently had been out of my reach behind the paywall. Some of the seams show across the length of its brief seasons, where six episodes makes a marathon, and things tail off some toward the end of the fourth. The 2018 attempt at an interactive movie, Bandersnatch, was even weaker, a novelty at best—it has pieces of the experience of Black Mirror the way action figures have pieces of the experience of a movie. So I was happy to see the fifth season back to approximately full strength, albeit also back to the original dispensation of only three episodes. Charlie Brooker writes or cowrites all the scripts and remains one of the constants on a show that specializes in cryptic spooky one-offs, Outer Limits style. It's alterna-reality horror stories in a near-future SF mode, brilliantly constructed but somehow not easy to binge, because each one takes some time to put a dense attack of concept, characters, and situation in place. Almost always near the 20-minute or 25-minute mark I was liable to find myself impatient and ready to bug out for a wallow in news headlines or something. Give it 10 minutes more, and I was usually fully hooked. Not that there is a formula to Black Mirror, but the high techno gadget concepts do require some 'splainin' as we go, usually paying off as the rainbow of directors (and Brooker's scripts) obviously know how to put together winning suspense splats. "Striking Vipers" is a parody of the Street Fighter video game that takes on issues of cybersex, which appear to be as thorny as ever if this one is to be believed (though the ending is muddled). "Smithereens" is a tense actioner, a kidnapping and extortion plot with Topher Grace getting a shot at doing Mark Zuckerberg. Is this going to be like the way major actors take turns playing the U.S. president? Does it really have to be Zuckerberg? This one is funny and tragic both, as Black Mirror can do. The big finish to the season, "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too," is a sendup of celebrity and fan dynamics coupled with one of Brooker's favorite themes, in which copying the algorithms of a human personality into an AI device also tends to bring the conscious sense of self along with it. The episode makes great use of Miley Cyrus, doing a kinda sorta version of her own Hannah Montana story, accented by one of the cruelest stage mothers in all fiction (proxy for Disney? inquiring minds want to know), followed by a harrowing escape and transition to sweet liberation. Cue the band: Miley and crew rave it up in a tiny rock club covering "Head Like a Hole" with a monster act in a bracing, glorious version. Demonstrating, as always, the way life could/should? be in our strange modern world.